Joe Elliott in Favor of New Def Leppard Biopic but Won’t Fund It

Joe Elliott said Def Leppard would be interested in the making of a new biopic, following the flop of VH1’s 2001 production Hysteria – The Def Leppard Story.

In April 2019 he’d described that release as “the biggest pile of shit ever made” and said he believed its failure meant no one would be interested in making another. However, now he argues that, as a result of the success of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, Elton John’s Rocketman and Motley Crue’s The Dirt, a modern movie about his band would be of a much higher standard two decades on.

“You've got to remember the one that was done for us was 20 years ago,” Elliott told SiriusXM in a recent interview (via Blabbermouth). “It was such a non-event. In the history of music, people weren't doing movies on bands… It was low budget. It was an experiment on VH1's part. We had barely any say in what they did.”

He recalled that producers had attempted to “rush the storyline” to the point of intolerable inaccuracies, and that shooting in Canada meant the scenery didn’t match the band’s birth in the industrial northeast of England. He continued; “Things have moved a long way since then. The Queen movie set a precedent that's gonna be pretty hard to top. A billion dollars at the box office is insane. I mean, that's bigger than Bond movies. [Rocketman] did incredibly well. The Dirt did really, really well. … [T]here's such a standard set that it would have to match those three movies that we mentioned. So it would be a much, much better version of what that story was.”

Elliott continued that the storyline of a new movie would be similar to the original: “Band forms in Sheffield, has some success, drummer loses his arm, has some more success, guitarist loses his life, band carries on, and we basically hang in there as best we can to promote what we are. Yeah, it could make a good film.” But he added: “We're not gonna fund one ourselves, but if Pixar or Disney or somebody decided they wanted to do it, we would embrace it the same way we ended up embracing the [Rock and Roll] Hall of Fame.”